GO GETTER – educational puzzle game
Tác giả của trò GoGetter kể chuyện sáng tạo trò chơi này: (trò chơi này khởi đầu chuỗi đồ chơi trí tuệ SmartGames công ty Smart NV của Bỉ, mà ông này điều hành)
THE STORY BEHIND THE CREATION OF GOGETTER
GoGetter, the first smart puzzle I invented was the result of a misunderstanding. I had started playing with the idea of using cats and mice in a board game when one of my colleagues from Smart, asked me why we didn’t do a puzzle with pathways. The result was completely different from what she’d had in mind – a nice example of serendipity (one of my favorite words): sometimes, when you are looking for one thing you find something completely different.
GoGetter is also the game that started the brand SmartGames, a collection of single player logic games with multiple challenges from easy to very hard. There is a time line with the year of release of all SmartGames if you want to know more about that.
THE FIRST SMARTGAME
Before I started inventing games, I never puzzled much myself, probably because I found normal puzzles too limited. When I was working on GoGetter, I didn’t know about other brain games with multiple challenges like Rush Hour yet. I wanted to make a puzzle that was different every time you played it, a puzzle that had some kind of changing maze. My first prototype even included short bedtime stories. Naïve as I was, I thought that once people had played a few challenges, they would be creative enough to make up more challenges on their own. The first (American) version had only 12 challenges, but the next version was expanded to 24 and the current one has 48 challenges. All are without stories, but luckily kids make up their own. When I was testing the game, I said to a child, ‘Now you have to connect the paths so the cat can go to the mice.’ The child answered, ‘But I don’t want to, because then the cat is going to eat the mice.’
CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
GoGetter is different from most other SmartGames because the challenges have more than one solution. Kids sometimes find this confusing at the beginning, but a teacher once told me that she liked the game for that exact same reason. Most things you learn in school are either right or wrong, but out in the real world, things are much more complex. One GoGetter solution is not necessarily ‘more right’ than another, only different. By comparing each other’s solutions, children can learn that there are several paths to a destination and that whichever path you take, it’s seldom a straight line.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
As I worked on GoGetter, I made 3 versions of the game to demonstrate that the concept could be taken in different directions although I never intended to actually make 3 GoGetter games. But because the first version of GoGetter was developed by another company, many things were different from what I’d expected. They said that they would make a 3D version of the game, so I was quite disappointed when I saw the first sample and I found out that they had just translated my drawings into high relief. Although the effect was quite nice, it had not been applied very logically throughout. For example, the paths on the border of GoGetter – Prince & Dragon were in relief, but the pathways on the tiles were not. I learned from this experience that it is better to stay in control of the complete development of a game.
Trang web: http://www.smartgamesandpuzzles.com/inventor/GoGetter.html